Poised to heat up the dancefloor, David Tibet of Current 93 has just announced that Black Ships Ate the Sky is getting some dancy remixes from Foetus and Matmos . Of course, this will be a white label 12" single with absolutely no writing anywhere seeping into the trendiest DJ shops in Berlin. Also in Durtro news are updates on a double vinyl version of this year's album, the CD of the Om split, live appearances and more.

Black Ships Ate The Sky double vinyl album imminent

This is a double vinyl album containing the same tracks as the 'Black Ships Ate The Sky' CD. It comes in a beautiful gatefold sleeve with much new artwork, a stunning gatefold painting by Seth Cox-Dorée of myself seeing the Black Ships arrive whilst Christ and AntiChrist appear in the sky and Great Baal watches over the all, and an extensive booklet with all lyrics and band photographs. Some of the photographs of band members are different to those on the CD. We will be making between 1000-1500 copies. This is now in the Durtro shop for advance ordering at £17.50 plus postage and packing and VAT where applicable. (Please note: this is NOT available from Durtro Jnana, Canada).

Expected release: mid-October/early November

Black Ships Eat The Sky CD imminent

'Black Ships Eat The Sky' is an album of alternate mixes of the original 'Black Ships Ate The Sky' that we created when we were doing the original album. It sounds very different, to my, and my friends', ears at least: far more intimate and more emphatically acoustic than the original version. It comes in a six-panel digipak. It is very unlikely this will be available in the shops; we expect to manufacture around 1000-1500 copies. This is now in the Durtro shop for advance ordering at £12 plus postage and packing and VAT where applicable. It will also soon be available from the Jnana Records shop.

Expected release: mid-October

'Black Ships Heat The Dancefloor': Current 93 remix CD & 12" imminent

My old friends Jim Thirlwell, of Foetus and much other fame, and Matmos are remixing three of the tracks from 'Black Ships Ate The Sky'. This will be released as a CD and 12". More details as soon as we have a release date.

Current 93/Om: Inerrant Rays of Ineffable Sun CD imminent

The long awaited CD of the two tracks by C93 and Om that made up the 'Inerrant Rays of Ineffable Sun' 10" vinyl EP on Neurot Records. There is a North American edition and a UK/European edition of the CD. The artwork differs slightly on each version. The North American version has Om first, then C93. The UK edition has C93 first, then Om. The versions of the track by C93 differ quite radically on both versions, though the Om track is identical. They will be sent out as soon as we receive each edition, so if you order both editions we will send them out in separate packets, unless the release schedule changes and they come out simultaneously. These are now in the Durtro shop for advance ordering at £7.50 each plus postage and packing and VAT where applicable. They will also soon be available from the Jnana Records shop.

Expected release: US edition: mid-October; UK edition: beginning of November

David Tibet appears on new Matmos CD

David contributes vocals to a new Matmos 3" CD called "For Alan Turing". Also appearing on the CD is Clodagh Simonds. Matmos say on their website:

"Each copy is hand assembled and signed by Drew and M.C. and the tracklisting is as follows:

Enigma Machine for Alan Turing

Messages from the Unseen World (featuring David Tibet)

Cockles and Mussels (featuring Clodagh Simonds)

As you may have guessed by now, this EP is our tribute to British mathematician, philosopher, cryptographer, and homosexual martyr Alan Turing; it contains material which was originally intended for "The Rose Has Teeth In the Mouth of Beast" but which was held up as it took us awhile to get our hands on a functioning Enigma machine".

There were some problems with the printing of some of the initial pages; consequently they are being reprinted, which means we expect to have the book in about 3 to 4 weeks time. We apologise for the delay with this publication which is out of our hands.

Shirley Collins: major London appearance 31 October 2006

Shirley Collins will be performing her multimedia presentation of her wonderful 'America Over The Water' autobiography at London South Bank's Purcell Rooms on 31 October. I have seen this presentation develop over the years many times, and it is heartbreakingly beautiful and moving. See you there.

For more details go to www.rfh.org.uk. At this moment Shirley's show is not on their website, but keep checking. Doors 7pm. Tickets are £10.

David Tibet guests in a live concert with Larsen and their friends in Turin, 15 September. Concert to be filmed and recorded for CD and DVD release

"The title says it all: at the centre of attention is the alphabet. In the sense of the single letters. Considered however as elements in and of themselves, gifted in some way with a true semantic individuality: the ideogram A - a hut, C - symbol of the moon... this is how they were understood by Karel Teige: 1920s Czechoslovakian cultural radical, founder and principle theorist of the Devetsil collective, largest driving force of the local avant-garde surrealists. Designer, student of architecture and visual art, Teige attacked with modern force in the exploration of the possibility of an interweaving of verbal art and optical expression, industrial technology and mass media, inspired by the poem composed in 1923 by compatriot Vitezslav Nezval: at that time involved in Devetsil: Abeceda specifically. The same Nezval said on the subject of opera, "It is intellectual exercise around the most elemental poetic object: the letters of the alphabet." Language taken back to its minimal terminology, to the essence of spelling and phonetics of its building blocks in which derive the rhyming quarters of every letter - 25 in total - of the Latin alphabet. Ulterior developments of Abeceda made the ominous volume realised three years after Teige, that applied the notion of 'poeticism' on the live body of Nezval's opera, that is, the symbiosis between visual and verbal signs which position the same fundamentals of Devetsil. In his words, "The artistic fruit of Poetism is negligent, fantastic, exuberant, playful, anti-heroic and erotic."

Conceived and built as a poetic dialogue between text and images, Abeceda manifests still now the real extraordinary expressive urgency. They are established elements, as well as the verses of Nezval, the photography of Karel Paspa that paints the suggested figuration from the original text on the dancer and choreographer Milca Mayerova (she also, like the same Paspa, adhered to the Devitsil movement). Factors combined from Teige with imprint photomontage techniques, "I have tried to create a photo-style of an exquisitely abstract and poetic nature, translating in graphic form that which Nezval expressed in his verses as verbal poetry," to gloss the author. Drawn into cultural oblivion following the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany, the memory of Abeceda has resurfaced only recently. In 2001, when the work was at the centre of the exhibition Dreams and Disillusions - Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-garde at the Grey Art Gallery in New York (occasions in which were presented the video of the subject of the year before at Wolfsonian-Florida International University), and again in the last months, inserted in the basic theme of the exposition Modernism - Designing a New World (1914-1939) hosted by the London Victoria & Albert Museum.

Teige and the other members of Devetsil would have certainly liked the ulterior declination of Abeceda built by Larsen. The Turinian group, active for more than ten years (a passage documented by six albums, the last and most recent being Seies), that communicate an eclectic and multi-disciplined approach to musical material. Specimen, in that sense, the work done years ago by Winsor McKay with his cartoons, put to music by Larsen under the wording of Cartoanimalettimatti (a project premiered in 2002 during the festival Rimusicazioni) and in general the stateless attitude with which the quartet measures the codes of rock, after the zeroing of the same rock provoked by punk, as such to make Larsen more appreciated abroad than in their own country. Reasons for which the artistic interlocutors of the Turinian group tend to place themselves beyond borders. American are both the labels - Young God and Important Records - that have released their music so far, and many of their partners seen often by their side, Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu) - in the configuration called XXL, or Matmos and the ex-Swans Michael Gira and Jarboe. All icons of the independent music scene across the ocean.

Some of these accomplices will play with Larsen on Abeceda: David Tibet founder of the English 'Hallucinatory Patripassianist Apocalyptic' group Current 93, a project that also involves Baby Dee, transgender cult icon from the Manhattan off scene, same underground the cello player Julia Kent, of Antony and The Johnsons, belongs to, whereas Johann Johannsson, musician and producer that has worked with Marc Almond and Barry Adamson, comes from Iceland. Also on stage with the band will be the Bulgarian performer and choreographer Snejanka Mihaylova; together with Larsen, and the visuals by the Bellissimo team inspired by Tiege's Abeceda, they will set up a concert/performance in 25 movements, one for each letter of the latin alphabet; elaborate and fascinating staging, exclusive worldwide preview for the Torino Settembre Musica festival and its audience."